Site Navigation

Site Mobile Navigation

Opening the Broadcasters’ Books

Television stations have been making a lot more money from campaign ads since the Supreme Court helped lift the limits on contributions to political groups. The public, though, has been kept in the dark about how much these groups and the so-called super PACs are spending, and where they are spending it, because the stations don’t want to make it easy to find out how much they are being paid for those ads.

On Friday, the Federal Communications Commission will have an opportunity to make this murky process far more transparent. By voting to require broadcasters to report their political ad sales on a national database — rejecting the stations’ claim that this is too burdensome or expensive — the commission can help the public get a far broader sense of the powerful financial forces driving today’s politics.

Stations are now required by the F.C.C. to keep a paper log of all ads they run for candidates and independent political groups, showing how much was charged for each ad. Members of the public can request the logs, but only in person at the offices of each station. That makes it extremely difficult and expensive to compile a full record of how much each candidate or political group is spending.

The obvious solution in a digital age is to require the stations to post this information on the Internet, where anyone can see it, and where it can be tallied up.

That’s what the F.C.C. has proposed doing, even offering to host all the data on its Web site so the public and the press do not have to go from one station’s Web site to another for all the information. “Physically going to a station and sifting through documents is time-consuming, travel-intensive and difficult,” said a member of the commission, Mignon Clyburn. “Creating a meaningful way for the public to view these files with an online engagement is, to quote a popular commercial, ‘priceless.’ ”

The moment that the F.C.C. made this proposal last fall, it drew fierce opposition from most of the big media companies that own television stations, including the big four networks, The Washington Post Company, Allbritton (which also owns Politico), Gannett, and many others. (The New York Times Company no longer owns broadcast outlets.)

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Many of these companies support greater transparency in other areas, but, on this matter, claim the reporting requirements would be too burdensome or expensive. What should be obvious is that it’s easier to keep data in electronic form than to print hundreds of paper pages.

We suspect that the real reason they don’t want the data to be accessible is that political advertisers, by law, must be charged the lowest rates for commercials. Businesses can be charged more, and the stations don’t want them to realize how much more they are paying.

Broadcasters use the public spectrum and have to adhere to regulations that are in the public’s interest. They made at least $400 million more in the 2010 elections than they would have without the Citizens United decision and stand to make an even greater windfall this year.

By requiring them to make those earnings accessible, the F.C.C. would help the public make better sense of the flood tide of money pouring into politics.

A version of this editorial appears in print on April 27, 2012, on Page A26 of the New York edition with the headline: Opening the Broadcasters’ Books. Today's Paper|Subscribe